Brain Gym® Journal, March 2002

 I am an educator. I started my career as a classroom teacher. I came to the profession idealistically believing that I could make a contribution. I studied educational philosophy and educational psychology, and took to heart the maxims common to these disciplines, including “Take the child from where he is and lead him to the next step”; “Help the child to discover what he needs”; and “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.” Few would deny the truth of these statements; however, in those early days I had no idea how to implement them in my classroom. Unfortunately for education, over the past 150 years we have paid lip service to this approach without exploring its real meaning. While we’ve experimented with a plethora of teaching methods, educators have paid little attention to how children actually learn.

In our information-based culture, we’ve come to equate teaching with the presentation of ideas and other mental data, and we equate learning with the regurgitation of that information. This emphasis on content and product has resulted in our present need to re-evaluate our schools and hold them accountable. Our schools abound with children labelled “learning disabled“, "ADD”, and “ADHD". Too many children today are not prepared for social interaction. They lack developmental physical experiences, and are not ready to take on abstractions, let alone memorise textbook answers (even if that were a productive endeavour).

Alfred Whitehead had the insight to say: “It is a profoundly erroneous truism … that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case.” As that mathematician and philosopher would have understood, children need to master concrete skills and operations, so that these abilities become automatic and alive, before talking about them and translating them into symbols.

To quote the great anatomist Peter Medawar, “Learning is not to think about operations that once needed to be thought about … we learn to make the processes of deliberate thought instinctive, and we learn to make automatic and instinctive processes the subject of discriminating thoughts.”

A growing number of educators and practitioners have come to understand that true teaching, like true learning, must be reflected in the body – must be connected with the moving, sensing, and doing parts of our being. This is the reason that Brain Gym® is recognised worldwide as the door to learning, and that Dennison Laterality Repatterning has been called a visionary model for understanding the true learning process of integrating thought into action.

How can we create a classroom where the children can really show up? In Getting our Bodies Back, Christine Caldwell offers an answer as she challenges us all to show up now:

“Now is the only time we are present and accounted for. When our thoughts go into the future or the past, we can plan, remember, or compare. But the only time we can act is now. Being in the present moment creates direct experiences. Direct experience puts us in touch with our aliveness, with the accurate perception of being in the world and of the world. Being in the here and now awakens us to the knowledge of the vibrant, pulsing body in which we live and move.”

True Teaching Fosters True Learning

In my travels around the world, I see the Brain Gym activities implemented in child-centred classrooms where real learning takes place. I see the child honoured. I see the child working at his or her own pace and measuring success by physical accomplishments, not by abstract grades and comparison to others. The Brain Gym movements invite children to move in new ways that, in an ideal developmental process, would probably occur spontaneously. Brain Gym grounds the new learning within the body and helps integrate the reflexive movements of infancy and survival so that these movements hold more consciousness and self-awareness.

The embodied learner needs to play, build, explore, and create through art, music, dance and sports. The embodied classroom must have no curriculum beyond the child’s curiosity. The ideal teacher for this classroom is an active learner – a human being in love with the adventure of life. Comprehensive information and materials provide a resource and a source of stimulation, to enable teacher and student o follow their dreams. Culture will be invented and reinvented in the daily life of the community that is created in the classroom.

In the new classroom, children play – focussed and grounded in their bodies – knowing where they are in space. They are centred, alive with their feelings, in touch with their sensations and movements, in love with what they’re doing, interacting with the world, and experiencing the tension between reality and imagination, between the mechanics of the process and the felt sense of it, the details and the overall guiding vision.

Literacy in the 21st century must transcend information processing. The child of today has all the data at his fingertips. The embodied classroom will teach him how to find what is relevant, and guide him to integrate knowledge into his functioning self so he will use it meaningfully to create his authentic experience.

Paul and Gail Dennison, 23 January 2004  

Educational Kinesiology (Edu-K) is a distinct and dynamic branch of education, one founded on the principle that movement is the basis for all learning. The Latin root word educare (“to educate”) comes from educere (“to draw out”), and kinesis means movement. In Edu-K we say that movement patterns influence function, while function likewise influences movement patterns. The Edu-K processes are designed to facilitate whole-brain learning for academics, business, sports, and other daily-life activities.

Human beings share a physical functioning that is both wonderfully simple and profoundly complex. In Edu-K, our focus is on the physical and mental skills, as well as the emotional qualities, that we want to support. Anecdotal research shows that many people who use this programme experience increased fitness and well-being—a general feeling of good health—as a natural byproduct of their enhanced self-expression and greater ease in performing everyday functions.

Edu-K, including the self-help program Brain Gym® and its co-process, Educational Kinesiology In Depth: Seven Dimensions of Intelligence, is used primarily by movement educators. Such practitioners know well that this field of study offers individuals a way to reconnect with innate intelligence and to develop or restore both physical and mental functioning.

Edu-K is also often used by physicians, mental health professionals, allied health professionals, and others to support and maintain their patients’ and clients’ health . Such professionals may work either in a non-medical model of health enhancement or in a medical model (academic or complementary), if they are trained and licensed to do so. Both medical and health-enhancement professionals know that Edu-K empowers people to define and realize their goals of well-being and of skilled reading, writing, and communication; to achieve coordination of their skills, desires, and needs; and to improve their ability to release stress and find balance.

Even when used in these ways, Edu-K remains a non-medical method, employing only its own well-established educational terms (such as PACE , noticing, play, co-ordination, and integration) that accurately reflect the Edu-K work and process, and making no use of medical terms (such as therapy, symptoms, diagnosis, or treatment) or of any medical or academic labels.

Brain Gym Instructors are not licensed to diagnose, treat, or attempt to cure any medical condition. In Edu-K, we see human beings and their bodies as dynamic, not static; what’s important to us is how a person actually functions. By that we mean: What is the relationship between an individual’s goal or intention and his or her daily patterns of movement?

Thus Educational Kinesiology is not part of any medical model. It is a purely educational form of human interaction, designed to complement any course of learning or personal development being pursued. In Edu-K, we observe that health derives from the body-mind system’s ability to function creatively in wholeness. This kind of health is more than a lack of illness. It is the ability to take vital and appropriate action in one’s life and to include rest and restoration as needed.